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By meticulously assembling photos taken from two cameras aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, a team of scientists has compiled the most accurate maps of Pluto and Charon to date.
We have seen photos and maps of Pluto and Charon before, but these maps now represent our best current understanding of the surface features and topology of these distant objects in the Kuiper Belt.
When New Horizons flew over Pluto and Charon on July 14, 2015, he took photos at a feverish pace with his two onboard cameras, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). A research team led by Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Global Institute has assembled these photos to create a global mosaic of these distant worlds.
It turned out to be a long and laborious enterprise, demanding that researchers collect the scattered images as a gigantic. puzzle. The work was done over a two-year period as New Horizons data slowly returned to Earth.
"It was an effort to align the cards and make them accurate," Schenk told Gizmodo. "Part of the problem is that we did not get all the data at once – New Horizons transmits on a slow radio link, so we received about three to four images at a time." That meant we had to completely review our data every few weeks
The Schenk team, in addition to creating global maps, made topographic maps of Pluto and Charon, which they did by analyzing the images stereoscopic captured by both cameras
"What has impressed me the most, is the great variety of features seen on Pluto and Charon, "said Schenk." We saw things we did not know were going to be there like mountains that climbed six kilometers, and land that seemed to be shaped by glaciers These features Eristic were very similar to Earth, but they were all made of methane ice and nitrogen. "
The resulting global images and topographic maps have been archived to NASA's planetary data system, but in the meantime the details of this research can be found in the latest edition of the scientific journal Icarus (new maps of Pluto here). , and new maps of Charon here.) The maps offer the best resolution we have for each geological area, highlighting the rich tapestry of surface features on Pluto and Charon.
Take Tenzing Montes, for example, a Beautiful mountain range on Pluto Located along the southwestern margin of Sputnik Planitia – a vast plain composed of frozen nitrogen – this mountain features steep cliffs, some at angles reaching 40 degrees or more. about 6 km in height, which makes it comparable to Mount Denali in Alaska or Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania Tenzing Montes is filled with ice-water ri gide, which allows him to maintain his heights. Other ice on Pluto, such as methane and nitrogen, would be too weak, causing the collapse of such a high structure.
Topographic maps also depict an image of Sputnik Planitia itself. Its expansive layer of ice is 2.5 km thick on average, and its outer edges are very deep (about 3.5 km) below the sea level of Pluto.
As for Charon, it is a moon of topographical extremes. This moon has huge depressions near the North Pole, some extending over 14 km, which is deeper than the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Charon also has an equatorial depression that extends upwards at an altitude of 8 km.
"These features and many others make Charon the the most robust medium-sized satellite, with the exception of Iapetus, a high-contrast Saturn satellite, "says Ross Beyer, researcher at the SETI Institute in California and co-author of the new study, in a statement
Importantly, these maps are only partially complete. New Horizons has only been able to represent about three quarters of the area of Pluto and Charon. A good part is still a mystery. All the best reasons to launch another probe in the Kuiper belt.
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